Alito on Privacy and Gay Rights
The Boston Globe is touting a college paper by Judge Alito suggesting he supported privacy and gay rights back then. Not exactly.
He was the advisor on the paper for a task force of 16 students who researched these issues and arrived at their, not his, recommendations. Alito wrote the introduction describing their recommendations.
A classmate, Jeffrey G. Weil, said yesterday that Alito, one of the top seniors in his class, had been selected to advise juniors writing the report, coaching them through the research and then writing an introduction explaining their recommendations.
His role was mostly advisory, said Weil, who wrote the section of the report dealing with gay rights but who said he could not remember whether Alito personally agreed with the recommendations.
As one Harvard professor now says:
Richard H. Fallon, a professor at Harvard Law School, said that it would be a mistake to read too much into ''little bits of evidence like this" and that even if Alito held socially liberal views on gay rights, it would not necessarily mean that he would vote in favor of gay marriage or any other issue.
''From the fact that someone thinks legislators ought to forbid discrimination," he said, ''it does not follow that the person would necessarily think that the Supreme Court of the United States ought to hold that the Constitution forbids discrimination against gays."
Value of the Globe article in terms of clues to Judge Alito's views in my opinion: None
Update: Campus Progress has the full report (pdf).
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